An ever-increasing amount of digital content is created and consumed entirely electronically without ever existing in a traditional paper form. The cost savings that come from digital documents are very significant but there are drawbacks with paperless systems. In particular, material that has legal or paralegal status presents significant challenges in a fully digital environment because of the legal weight associated with physical (typically paper-based) manifestations of critical documents such as laws, contracts, testimony etc. Individual laws in United States are printed on paper and signed in ink, in person, by a senior elected official (e.g. a Governor) with various witnesses present. Typically a set number of originals are signed by the official at a signing ceremony and the copies are distributed to various locations for safe keeping. Typical destinations for these signed originals include the secretary of state's office, the state library, the governor's office, the legislature and the supreme court. Parliaments in United Kingdom and Ireland have similar systems in which laws are printed on special paper known as “vellum” and signed by a head of state. In Ireland for example, laws are signed on vellum by the president, using non-fugitive ink, with witnesses present and each page of each law is initialised. Contract documents are printed and signed in ink, in person with various witnesses present. Signed original copies are then typically kept by each party to the contract. In tort cases for example, the original signed contracts are admissible evidence in courts of law. Documents to be used in formal legal settings such as passport application forms are witnessed, signed in ink and stamped by legally empowered individuals known as notaries. Much of the current legal infrastructure in the world is built on this physical-centric model of authenticity.
The physical originals which are signed and witnessed may be referred to as having a ‘first order authenticity’. The term ‘first order authenticity’ refers to the true original document by virtue of existing in a tamper evident physical form, created with all the necessary witnessing/notarizing required to meet relevant legal requirements. A copy of an original document has a ‘second order authenticity’. The term ‘second order authenticity’ refers to the mass-produced copies of first order authentic documents. A second order document is a near replica of a first order authentic target document. The fidelity of the replica is >=0% and <100%. In other words, a second-order authentic document may have no relationship whatsoever to the original (a 0% authentic copy). It might have a very high relationship to the original, but the degree of match will always remain less than 100%. If the match was exactly 100%, then the document would have first order authenticity because it would be completely indistinguishable from the first order authentic target.
From the earliest days of written legal materials, great lengths have been taken to ensure that first order authentic material could be differentiated from the second order authentic materials i.e. ensuring that the second order authenticity would always remain <100% of the first-order authentic target so that forgeries could be detected.
As technology has evolved, the dualism between first order authentic legal materials and second order legal materials has remained. Today, the day-to-day practical use of both is a complex mix of government mandate, private business pragmatism, social convention and legal precedent. Today, social constructs and pragmatic business conventions have been institutionalized to deal with the inherent risk that a digital document with only second order authenticity may not be accurate enough for the purpose at hand. Government agencies have been created to create high quality legal materials with second order authenticity.
Today, the vast majority of second-order authentic legal materials are accessed/distributed electronically. This may be viewed as a more efficient alternative to the previous methods of creating mass copies such as paper based print runs or micro-fiches. The digital world adds nothing new here in the sense that the legal world has long established methods for dealing with the risks inherent in second order authenticity of legal materials. Electronic forms of such legal materials are simply the latest manifestation of the second order authenticity phenomenon which has been around ever since copies were made possible by the invention of clay tablets, paper etc.
However, law makers, courts, government agencies and other generators of first order legal materials are coming under increasing pressure (financial and cultural) to “go paperless” completely. This raises significant challenges for a digital document to have first order authenticity. Without signed/witnesses master paper copies on some physical medium, how can first order authentic digital materials be differentiated from second order copies, given that purely digital copy operations are bit-for-bit perfect replicas of the source? One of the challenges encountered is how can a digital document be authenticated. In particular, how can the time honoured and legally binding concepts of signing and witnessing be implemented in a purely digital world?
The problem has become more pressing with Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web as there is an increasing number of third order, fourth order and fifth order authentic materials appearing as content is repurposed, repackaged, transformed, aggregated on search engines, blogs, etc. With each layer of content transformation and repurposing, the differences between the original and the copy get more and more pronounced and questions of authenticity become more complicated to determine.
There is therefore a need for a data repository configured for facilitating authenticating digital content by simultaneously providing original content and modified content which are addressable for point-in-time retrieval.